Her body was so distorted that even her face did not appear human. My eyes moved from her face along the contours of the rest of her body. Everything appeared waxy and grey.

Her hand was all that remotely resembled something belonging to a human, and even it was unlike any other hand. Her tan lines were just a shade of grey darker than those areas of skin normally hidden from the sun. I shouldn't even call them lines at all; just zones of transition really.

Her mouth, slightly opened, was stiff and her lips were not pink, and there was no red hue typical of the gums. Even her wrinkles had been smoothed out from the perfusion technique that pumped her blood vessels with the preservatives.

Her body was strangely malleable, and yet resistant to my touch. When I touched her arm, her flesh did not have the familiar suppleness and recoil of skin. In fact, I had to press deeply and firmly into her shoulder in order to get the flesh to move. It took the shape of my fingers. If she had been alive, I would have hurt her. And when I released the skin, it did not return to its previous form, the mark of my indentation remaining present.

My eyes moved back to her hand; it was more solid, more substantive than a living hand, yet strangely it felt empty all the way down to the bone.

* * *

Over the last ten years or so, the public display of bodies has come into vogue once again. Since the Renaissance there have been times when anatomic dissections were done publically, and since preservation techniques, there have been installations of dissected bodies placed in museums for viewing.

With the new plastination techniques of the last decade, once again, bodies have been put on display for purportedly educational purposes. These bodies are not quite so rigid as they were when I was in anatomy lab in the late 1980s.

Plastination preserves the body, without all the noxious chemicals and it allows the body to become significantly more malleable.

In the last 18 months, two travelling exhibits of plastinated bodies have come through St Louis. Premier Exhibitions- a company that produces various travelling educational exhibits - had placed its exhibit, "Bodies: The Exhibition," in the Galleria Shopping Mall, occupying a large retail space left empty by the economic downturn.

A sign over the exhibit entrance encouraged students to "learn about themselves" as they travel through the exhibition. Students could fulfil the command of the Oracle at Delphi, to "know thyself."

As spectators move forward from the ticket purchasing area to the ticket collecting area, there were a series of posters lining the long corridor. The posters depicted eight or ten major figures in the history of medicine, from Hippocrates to Galen, to Vesalius, to Louis Pasteur, to Watson and Crick.

The tone of the exhibit was triumphalist: we were lost and living in the dark ages when a few men - they were all men - of science drove us forward in knowledge against the etiquette of a squeamish and superstitious society.

Opening the dead body in the face of an opposition was the first step toward our salvation from death and decay - or so the story went.

Once inside, bodies were displayed in various positions. Each body was without skin except in a few strategic places to help orient the viewers, because it is difficult to orient oneself in the dissected body. Sometimes the organs were highlighted; sometimes it was the musculature, at other times the nerves or blood vessels.

The precision of the anatomic dissections was remarkable, even elegant. The dissections were so good that what stood out was just how much space there is in the human body, or rather just how empty the body really is.

More recently, another exhibit, "Body Worlds and the Brain," stopped in St Louis. This exhibit was one created by the now famous anatomist, Gunter von Hagens. His exhibits have travelled the world over, and his advertizing claims that his exhibits are the "original exhibition of real human bodies."

An image used in the promotional materials for the exhibit shows the upper torso and head of a body with the skin pealed back and the various muscles of the face exposed. One can see the Parotid and sub-mandibular salivary glands, the mandible, as well as the muscles of mastication. One can peer deeply into the face; it is striking how so much empty space exists even in the face.

The Frontal bone and skull-cap are removed, and the brain is visible along with the meninges - a thin, clear, vascular membrane that lines the outer surface of the brain.

A sparkle of light reflects from the top of the cerebrum in the image, as if to remind us that at one point, this body was animated, or perhaps that a self once resided somewhere deep in the brain. The photo seems to suggest that the seat of the soul is here, where light emanates from the brain.

In each exhibit, the bodies were placed into everyday poses. Most striking were the action poses, a body opened with musculature exposed, kicking a soccer ball, a leg extended such that the foot hit the ball perfectly.

Another body leans over in a veritable Heisman trophy pose, football cradled in the left hand, right arm extended to resist an approaching tackle. The Heisman trophy body was dissected such that its back muscles were exposed as it leaned forward against the would-be tackler. The vertebrae - the back bones - were removed, exposing the spinal cord with the nerve roots extending along different muscle planes.

The stark tension between the lifeless and motionless bodies in positions that suggested motion and life was only exceeded if one got close enough to see the faces. The Asian facial features of each body in "Bodies: The Exhibition," contrasted sharply with the fact that the body was playing American football.

Much of the criticism levelled by critics of body-exhibition has been directed at the origin of the bodies. In fact, von Hagens himself - the founder of Body Worlds - directed criticism at his competitors, Premier Exhibitions, because many of the bodies that Premier acquired and displayed came from the Chinese government.

The people whose bodies these were had not consented to plastination or to exhibition. Von Hagens insists that all of his bodies have been donated; and he routinely advertises this fact to call the morals of his competitor into question.

There are several stories that can be told about the bodies in these exhibitions.

There is the story that the exhibitors would like to tell us. These bodies are just like ours. Just like us, they ran and played games. They played soccer and football, and cards. Bodies are malleable; they can take the shape of whatever we want to do with them.

Closely allied to this story is another. You can make your body healthy or diseased. At one installation in "Bodies: The Exhibition," there were two sets of lungs - one set healthy and one set from a former smoker. Beside the display was another case in which viewers were encouraged to deposit their cigarettes. The story here seems to be that you can shape your own body, that you are the sculptor of your own health.

There is the story told by the cosmopolitan and politically correct critics of the exhibition of bodies. They tell the story of poor Chinese people - or worse of Chinese prisoners - whose families could not afford to follow their own cultural customs of body disposal.

What right does the Chinese government have to take possession of the bodies and hand them over for plastination and to sell them for display? This story is about ownership and authority over the body. After all, the worst insult to Western sensibilities is that one cannot do with one's body what one desires.

Life and liberty are referred to under the general name of property according to Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. After all, "man ... hath by Nature a Power ... to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate," Locke notes in the Second Treatise.

Of course all of these stories are highly Western, and the exhibitors align these stories with the story of Western civilization. The long corridor of posters told us the story of the body veiled from view and saved from ignorance and death by men whose pursuit for knowledge outweighed the mores of their culture.

Displaying the dissected body has historical precedent. The exhibitors align their purposes with those great anatomists, scientists and artists - Vesalius and da Vinci among them - all geared toward our education, toward greater knowledge, toward knowledge of the self.

Yet, as we learned from Locke, the physician, the self is a tabula rasa, an empty and blank slate. We either narrate ourselves into existence or we are narrated into existence by others. Plastinated bodies are manoeuvred into positions playing football, or soccer, or tennis, or cards so that others might know themselves.

But is there anything to be known about blank slates and empty bodies? It seems that it is precisely this emptiness that we hope to fill up as we try to animate our bodies with games and meaningless activity that diverts us from our dead and empty bodies, our dead and blank selves.

* * *

By the time my classmates and I had gotten to her, someone else had already removed her skull-cap; her brain was already in a bucket of preservative, set aside for the Spring semester, when we would do neuro-anatomy.

She was our first patient - literally patient, passive to our every move. We would later use a hacksaw to cut down the mid-line of her head and face, cut up through the middle of her pelvis, disarticulate joints, open cavities, poke, prod and penetrate deeply into her body.

After we had finished with her, she would appear even less human after all of our manipulations.

We didn't even know how she died. By the time we had gotten to her heart, we juvenile medical sleuths had suspected atherosclerosis and subsequent myocardial infarction as the cause of her death. The left main and left anterior descending artery - the major arteries that supply blood the bulk of the muscle of the left heart - felt like bone with its calcifications.

Still, there was no way to tell if part of her heart was ischemic, if the cause of her death was a myocardial infarction. The entire heart muscle was the same grey colour throughout.

She already appeared less than human when we had arrived in the anatomy lab. And ironically, in order for us to learn, to know the human form, we had transformed her into something even less human. She no longer had the form of a human, just an empty body of disarticulated bits, moulded into anatomic knowledge within our heads.

Yet, knowing her from the inside out, seeing parts of her body that few others had seen, and seeing parts of her body that no one else had ever seen, she remained unknown to us.

The truth is we knew nothing of her. Not only did we not know for certain how she had died, she was without name. There was nothing on her body to give us any clues as to what kind of work she might have done or who she was.

No story to tell. Her body was just a fact - an empty, cold, motionless fact - frozen in time and in the sterile space of the anatomy lab.

* * *

As we have travelled the long corridors of the West, it seems that we cannot know ourselves. In the post-Lockean West, the self and the body are thought to be blank slates to be written upon, canvasses to be painted upon, clay to be moulded according to our will.

We looked into the space of the body and did not find the soul; we looked deep into our brains and did not find the mind. There was nothing to be known here in this body, in this self.

The true story is that told by those who abstract from names in the sterile spaces of the laboratory, who abstract from the real bodies and real lives.

We are, in a way, just corpses seeking to know other corpses. No names except those names of parts that the anatomist has laid over the body. No importance to this hand, or that face, or that womb that bore others. No meaning, just an empty vessel. Or at least that is the story we have been told, or that we have told ourselves.

As I walked the corridors of these body exhibitions, my mind turned to them, and to her. I wondered if she had children or a lover that missed her. I wondered what her greatest accomplishments in life were and I wondered of what would she have been proudest.

I wondered what she would have wanted to me to know about her, if I had been her doctor. I wondered what she would have told me about herself if I had met her at a party or at the grocer. And I wonder what I would have learned about myself had I really known her.

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